Recent reviews by Emilio

Anode Heart is very inspired by Digimon World 1 & 3 and as a huge Digimon fan it really resonated with me.

The designs of the Tama's are very cute and all around look great.
The world design is super fun and does the whole thing Digimon World 1 did where exposed circuit boards can be seen on the ground and a ton of very large objects litter the area.
The character portraits are also very expressive and really bring some of the characters to life.

The story is rather simple and follows some conventional tropes of progression but despite that puts a fun spin on things through the deep lore and interesting environments.

There is a lot of ways to train your Tama, though I have to say on a casual playthrough it's not so difficult that you really need to make use of everything available to you.

The twist on combat that seperates it from Digimon and Pokemon is how you manage your time points to do several attacks in one round, aswell as techs having a certain amounts of command points and attacking after it runs out doing progressively more recoil damage back at you creates an interesting dynamic that I honestly think is a lot more fun compared to other similar games I have played.

Shoutout to the devs for including an incredible card game with tournaments and entire side quests dedicated to it that borderline rivals the normal game length.

For more experienced players or achievement hunters the game does have built in challenge modes to do stuff like nuzlockes, speedruns or limited lives, etc with optional even harder hardcore challenges.
With the ultimate challenge to complete the game with every single challenge at the same time.

If you're going for a 100% you're looking at a very challenging experience!

Overall Anode Heart is an incredible indie game that I can not recommend enough.
I implore everyone to atleast try the demo and see what you think!

Don't get me wrong the horde assault mode is really fun and probably the best addition to the game.
For 4€ on sale it's a fun enough excuse to enjoy the combat of Days Gone again.

That said this dlc is not worth it if you intend to play the story mode as the sorry excuse for a "remaster" is fundementally broken.
Bugs that existed since back when I played this years ago have never been fixed and to top it off the game is even buggier now then it ever was before.
Different menus at seemingly random times will no longer accept controller input. I can't count the number of times the map no longer let me zoom in/out and I had to use the scroll wheel, the mission complete screen not accepting the A button and having to click the mouse or the main menu to start the game requiring mouse to click continue.
Objects doesn't spawn properly and softlocks missions, NPCs get stuck and softlock missions, hell sometimes even the floor doesn't spawn and softlocks missions.

Playing through the game again for the permadeath mode and constantly running into these gamebreaking bugs was an awful experience.

The new graphics are largely left unchanged but the lighting is so much worse now. In the dark you can literally not see anything anymore and all the details of scenes or fights in caves or tunnels is completely ruined as you can't make out the enemies. The bloom in daytime is also blindingly terrible, resulting in yet again not being able to see enemies or much of the environment should you find yourself near reflective surfaces.

Overall the experience is the worst it's ever been and I urge you if you play this game now to go into the beta branch and play the much better non "remastered" version which is not compatible with this dlc.

It's really sad to think that new players who don't know better will probably only ever get to experience the game in this sorry state going forward :(

Frogun is a bit of a mix between Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and Crash Bandicoot.

The gameplay is surprisingly simple. You have a single jump, you can aim the titular frogun and shoot the frogun to either grapple towards a wall/big enemy or pull something smaller towards you to later throw.

Yet despite how simple the gameplay is, the level design is the highlight. With it's multilayered design you play it both as a fairly chill collectathon but also as a very "breakable" and very competitive speedrun game where the expert times really do expect you to completely abuse the systems in place to shortcut levels in ways you didn't think possible.
It hits the spot so good in both of these aspects and ends up being a hugely satisfying game to learn.

The game also introduces new gimmicks to stages at a consistent rate and never stops throwing you curveballs.
It also doesn't overuse previous gimmicks and brings them back and combines them in interesting ways when they do show up again.

My biggest complaint is honestly that because Renata falls so quickly after hitting a wall that every time the game expects you to chain wall grabs you at best have a split second between grabs and will result in you dying more often then you'd think.
The camera being so far away can also occasionally result in depth perception issues, though the very visible shadow under the main character really helps in this regard, even showing if you would land in a hazard.

While the story isn't the best and the music is okay but nothing special. This game resonated with me and I really think these devs have a good eye for level design.
This was a joy to play and I highly recommend it!

Jawbreaker is a game I can only really describe as being a "Grasshopper/Suda51-like" (The developer that is)
It's got that weird sort of comedic grim over the top Japanese parody of American slashers feel to it.
Which admittedly is a strange way to describe a game but I genuinely can't put it in better terms, it's how I felt from the main menu all the way to the end.

Let's start with the things I disliked first.
The game is way too easy and the enemies don't really possess much of a threat, the enemies that show up later in the game are even more harmless for some reason.
The guns and item pickups feel pointless because of how easy it is to avoid enemies. Apart from the odd healthkit every now and again I never had much use for the items and I never carried the guns on me because I didn't see much of a reason to shoot anyone.
The boss fights where also kinda boring since they are just a waiting game with a very clear solution.

Now on to everything else!
The world looks incredible, it's a post apocalyptic neon punk world that is all industrial and grimy.

The enemy faction the Faceless Gang is surprisingly varied, it is not just a bunch of psychopaths. Listening in on some of their dialogue you can tell some are a little less crazy than the others. It makes the enemy dialogue and clothing styles feel a lot less one dimensional.

The music is a fantasic mix of punk, rock and the occasional gangster rap song. Though some of the more horror focused parts have some electronic ambiance aswell. Really good soundtrack and a huge highlight!

The voice acting is fairly high quality and never feel out of place.
The moment to moment gameplay is really good, but the overall story isn't the best I have played.
I think some of the side characters are underdeveloped and I hope if there is a sequel that expands on the world!

The police station the game takes place in is really well made, it has a bit of a grounded feel to it as you're stuck and trying to escape one huge building.

Overall as a horror survival game the game does an exceptional job at having well paced puzzle exploration, horror stealth sections and more action filled setpieces in a healthy dose.

Criminally underrated game and well deserving of your time if you think it looks interesting!

The latin beat of the pirate level kicks ass!
Well what can you say about Super Kiwi 64, the game is an hour long and feels good to play.
It's a perfect small platformer if you're ever in the need for a platformer to play, though for the short runtime I only recommend it on sale.

The game is exactly as advertised. Nothing more, nothing less and I can respect that.

I will say I think the game has an issue of feeling a little edgy just for the sake of being edgy.
The game is very, very bloody. Guts spill out of the enemies and bosses in incredible amounts.
The characters swear constantly too, like comically too much swearing where it feels more juvenile than serious.
Also the fact it has the worlds longest boat ride kills replayablity completely.

That said the gameplay, art and music all hit it out of the park.
If you grew up on flash games where you balance bikes this is essentially just like those games but fleshed out into a metroidvania with combat.
You die if you hit your head and every enemy attack also insta kills you if it hits your body, though you can block bullets with your bike.

The music is incredible and very diegetic since you carry around a cassette player and eventually find cassette's to add to your collection. I just wish there was a shuffle button!

The art and character design is beautiful and consistently high quality, the boss kill animations are also incredibly stylish.

I like the story even if it's a little predictable at times.
There are some really good emotional moments in there.

Overall if you enjoyed old bike flash games then you owe it to yourself to try this game!
From a gameplay perspective it does exactly what I wanted and didn't introduce gimmicks or unnecessary gameplay mechanics.
A very purely fun game through and through!

If you like season 1 of Rick & Morty, season 1 in particular. Then this is your dream game.
It's got that signature ad lib and crude humor all throughout.

I didn't play this in VR and I never really felt like VR was in any way required to get more out of the game, it works well on a controller.

The gameplay is a bit strange as you're playing the camera guy and the titular character Trover at the same time. You can move up and down and pick up and throw stuff as the camera guy.

But your actual movement and combat is done with Trover who controls like a traditional video game character.
The only way to move the camera guy around is to activate pads on the ground you teleport to.

The actual combat is pretty braindead easy and the only time it's slightly challenging is the final boss, but only because the game swarms a bunch of enemies on you and you can easily stunlock yourself hitting the wrong enemy and getting hit during the recovery animation.

The highlight of the game is that it all feels completely ad libbed, just the like intergalactic cable episodes in Rick & Morty. Just about every single dialogue section in this game has 1-2 minute of required listening before you can progress but about 6+ minutes total if you just stick around and listen to them talk.
It's a lot of talking and you will sit and listen a lot more than you'll actually be playing.

Not all the dialogue is amazing and sometimes they really couldn't come up with anything interesting to say, so a few times it just devolves into them repeating themselves in different ways or screaming ♥♥♥ and AIDS over and over again for a few minutes.

If you like Justin Roiland's brand of humor then this is a gold mine of jokes and silly scenarios.
But if you can't stand the humor then this game has literally nothing to offer you.

I think A Plague Tale: Inncence is a fine game in it's own right.
But I also think the game really needed to let the player actually play the game a bit more.
Being a movie type game (in the style of Uncharted or The Last of Us), you basically go from cutscene to cutscene or from set piece to set piece.
With very little real gameplay in-between.

A lot of the puzzle sections solve themselves before we are even allowed to interact with the objects.
Most stealth section are little more than eavesdropping on soliders in the way until they move out of the way as you sneak through fairly linear corridors or in tall grass through an extended amount of time.
There is technically combat but it's far and few between.

Towards the end portions you finally get some amount of control during the gameplay and can finish certain sections in one of several ways, but by that point you're so powerful from your upgrades that you can very easily just murder everyone and avoid the stealth altogether.

The story itself is good for the most part but it suffers from most of the characters not being very fleshed out.
The three most established characters who you spend the most time with in the game are naturally the best ones too. But I really wish more of the collectibles atleast gave some more background story to the characters who get less screentime.

The music is good and fits the scenes they are part of. But they are very much just background music that don't really lend themselves to standalone listening unlike a lot of Olivier Deriviere other soundtracks.

My biggest issue with the game is the companion AI, who are are really annoying and will very often get stuck inside objects and force you to reload, run themselves into rats and kill themselves forcing another reload.
Or the game will simply let you climb on objects you shouldn't and get yourself stuck to reload a checkpoint.
There is also some areas where the game doesn't load properly unless you turn on v-sync or alt tab out of the game to force it to load the area properly again.

If the game had more generous checkpoints I wouldn't mind this as much. But it is very annoying losing 10 minutes of gameplay every so often cause my companion decided to kill themselves because of poor pathfinding.

Overall it's a good game and I still recommend it, and I really hope the sequel isn't as handholdy as this one.

TOEM is an unapologetically Swedish video game through and through, you can hear the Swedish accents and certain words despite the use of the Banjo Kazooie grunts and noises everyone makes.
And most of the areas and peoples names in the game is a play on Swedish words.
As a Swede this is intensely charming and I couldn't help but grin as I was playing it.

Mechanically speaking TOEM is a rather simple game, you interact with the environment by either talking to people or looking at/taking pictures of people.

Despite the simple gameplay it works out just cause of the silly and fun writing, charming characters and little secrets you find here and there.

My favorite part is how diegetic the music system is, your character has a walkman and when listening to the soundtrack in the game you see little headphones on the character.

The game fits the Steam Deck perfectly with the use of gyro to aim the camera around, and is how the game intuitively feels like it should be experienced.
Overall it is a sweet but short game and 100% worth your time to experience!

Ctrl Alt Ego is a really good game, but it has some issues.
The merging station level is just straight up a bad level, it is not fun and I do not enjoy playing through it.
Worst part of the game and made me take a small little break cause it was just not fun and goes against the entire immersive sim concept imo.

The powers are also weirdly inconsistent. I can find a lot of legitimate uses for them and there is a lot of creative stuff you can do within the constraints of the sandbox. But I often find myself not even bothering with using the powers available to me.
The short game time and how cost intensive these powers are means you really do have to play conservatively to properly use them. There is also a heavy cost to upgrading some of them to a state where they can actually provide you with more tangable long term puzzle solutions. Such as the ability to download and print objects costing a lot of worms just to do what I would consider pretty basic stuff.

The biggest issue in my opinion is the solutions to all the puzzles are fundementally the same, often boiling down to 2 choices. One choice for no powers and one choice that either requires a specific power or to kill another bot.
The immersive sim stuff is more how you get to the objective and in this regard the game is very open and offers creative solutions, though more often than not I had a feeling I was abusing glitches or doing stuff in an unintended way to win.

I also take issue in the fact that the bad bug enemies in the second half of the game instantly spot you the moment they make eye contact. I think the lack of a grace period is seriously limiting for the player on the first playthrough and forces a pretty boring and slow playstyle of scouting ahead with the pup for most of the gameplay. Pup scouting all the time isn't exactly what I would say is super fun since you can't do much outside looking around.

With all that said I think the game is a very solid experience and is one of the more competent immersive sim experiences I have played, I can tell the developer is very talented and knows what makes a good immersive sim not just enjoyable but also stimulating to break apart and learn.
I know a lot of the levels inside out now and I think the level design for the most part is VERY good, and the stuff you have to do to get around certain obstacles without powers was a blast (not looking at you merging station)

I know I probably phrase this review in a way that make it sound like a pretty negative experience but I genuinely think it is a game you should experience if you like immersive sims. This game is really good and I believe if the sequel irons out most of the issues I have with this one, it will probably be one of the best immersive sim games on the market.

A solid 8/10, maybe not as good as I have heard people say it is.
But a very good game that makes me hungry for a sequel.